Friday, September 01, 2017

truthdig | What took place in Charlottesville, like what took place in February when antifa and Black Bloc protesters thwarted UC Berkeley’s attempt
to host the crypto-fascist Milo Yiannopoulos, was political theater. It
was about giving self-styled radicals a stage. It was about elevating
their self-image. It was about appearing heroic. It was about replacing
personal alienation with comradeship and solidarity. Most important, it
was about the ability to project fear. This newfound power is exciting
and intoxicating. It is also very dangerous. Many of those in
Charlottesville on the left and the right were carrying weapons. A
neo-Nazi fired a round
from a pistol in the direction of a counterprotester. The neo-Nazis
often carried AR-15 rifles and wore quasi-military uniforms and helmets
that made them blend in with police and state security. There could
easily have been a bloodbath. A march held in Sacramento, Calif., in
June 2016 by the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party to protest attacks
at Trump rallies ended with a number of people stabbed. Police accused
counterprotesters of initiating the violence. It is a short series of
steps from bats and ax handles to knives to guns.

The conflict will not end until the followers of the alt-right and
the anti-capitalist left are given a living wage and a voice in how we
are governed. Take away a person’s dignity, agency and self-esteem and
this is what you get. As political power devolves into a more naked form
of corporate totalitarianism, as unemployment and underemployment
expand, so will extremist groups. They will attract more sympathy and
support as the wider population realizes, correctly, that Americans have
been stripped of all ability to influence the decisions that affect
their lives, lives that are getting steadily worse.

The ecocide by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries
alone makes revolt a moral imperative. The question is how to make it
succeed. Taking to the street to fight fascists ensures our defeat.
Antifa violence, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out,
is a “major gift to the right, including the militant right.” It fuels
the right wing’s paranoid rants about the white race being persecuted
and under attack. And it strips anti-capitalists of their moral capital.

Many in the feckless and bankrupt liberal class, deeply complicit in
the corporate assault on the country and embracing the dead end of
identity politics, will seek to regain credibility by defending the
violence by groups such as antifa. Natasha Lennard,
for example, in The Nation calls the “video of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer
getting punched in the face” an act of “kinetic beauty.” She writes “if
we recognize fascism in Trump’s ascendance, our response must be
anti-fascist in nature. The history of anti-fascist action is not one of
polite protest, nor failed appeals to reasoned debate with racists, but
direct, aggressive confrontation.”

This violence-as-beauty rhetoric is at the core of these movements. It
saturates the vocabulary of the right-wing corporate oligarchs,
including Donald Trump. Talk like this poisons national discourse. It
dehumanizes whole segments of the population. It shuts out those who
speak with nuance and compassion, especially when they attempt to
explain the motives and conditions of opponents. It thrusts the society
into a binary and demented universe of them and us. It elevates violence
to the highest aesthetic. It eschews self-criticism and
self-reflection. It is the prelude to widespread suffering and death.
And that, I fear, is where we are headed.